Posts by Doctor Syntax 42408 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
I remember a similar situation. Some code was exactly copied. IIRC there were two blocks of code that had had that treatment. They were reduced to functions. Having pruned the program down to manageable size like that I noticed a few near repeats which were reduced to a single function with a parameter to handle the differences. I think the result was about a quarter of the original length.
"Getting senior management to accept that is of course another matter."
Put it in a big box, a few LEDs (preferably trendy blue or white) with fancy logos. If manglement bod considers themselves to be techy add a noisy fan for the "working really hard" illusion.
"One can only hope it will start with wrestling the national telecommunications infrastructure from the hands of BT."
Why would they do that? It was privatised because generations of govts failed to find the cash to invest in it. To wrestle it back, as you put it, they'd have to find the cash to buy it back. Then they'd have to find more cash to invest in it. Are you saying investment should cease or do you want to pay more taxes? Or do you know of a magic money tree that'll finance all this?
"If you're using enigmail then yes it's easy. However that presupposes you know Unix and how to set it all up"
It also presupposes that your correspondents also use PGP. Of course most if not all of your correspondents probably don't use it because most if not all the people they know don't use it either.
I've said it before: it needs to be baked into the mail protocols and software as a default, not as an add-on. Until then, as the man said, it just raises a flag.
" Nowadays firms just launch ten different interfaces that perform the same function without considering more aesthetic design requirements..."
What???? No, all too often they provide a single interface which isn't the same as it was last month and is based entirely on aesthetics and fails on functional requirements.
Why do the media let them get away with this. The obvious rejoinders are:
Prove it
Who do you think is stupid enough to believe that?
How much data would you have lost if you weren't taking it seriously?
Has anybody in the media tried any of these?
"After all, if Cletus J Shitkicker the 3rd can't have those rights why would they give them to any dodgy foreigners?"
If Cletus J Shitkicker the 3rd were to move to the EU (assuming he could actually find it) he'd have those rights. It's not in the US govt's gift to decide what rights people in the EU have. The problem that needs to be solved is how to ensure that those rights are respected.
Conversely it's no concern of the EU how US citizens might react to discovering their govt makes them second class.
"Worst case, they'll probably just tack on an extra "you give us permission..." clause into the hundreds of pages of legalese terms and conditions all these services have hidden away and continue on as usual."
Courts tend to dislike unfair contract terms. In fact, they can dislike them so much as to invalidate the whole contract, not just the unfair term.
"In my opinion, nothing short of pitchforks and torches will stop this."
Pitchforks and torches have their place when legal process fails. Legal process is slow but seems to be working. It's started with Safe Harbour. It might take another trip round the block before they decide the game's up with that one. But don't think other countries won't be challenged; HMG's latest efforts are a response to previous challenges; again they haven't got the message yet but they'll be back in court until they do.
"try it, ban us and see how long before the populace storms the winter palace"
Apart from the fact that many of the big players have data centres in the EU already do you really think they're as daft as you seem to be? It's business. They'll do what's needed to keep the money coming in.
@ Grikath
As things stand I'd expect to be waiving pretty well any human rights to enter the US.
For the rest, businesses may try some of the things you suggest. I doubt they'll get away with it. In particular there'll be problems for any business that tries to use US-based services for HR; you can't get people to waive legal protections as a basis for employment. And I doubt there'd be too much success for sites trying to sell stuff if they ask you to grant them a waiver before they can provide you with information. It will take a little time and some big fines but the idea of obeying the law will start to get traction.
" if the commission said, nobody in europe could use Microsoft/Amazon/Google/Facebook/Netflix etc"
You appear not have been taking notice but a number of these large businesses have data centres in the EU already.
There is a need for them to ensure that they conduct their operations in conformance with the law here. With a bit of effort - the amount will depend on the outcome of the current Microsoft case - they shouldn't have a problem. The real problem comes from those companies who offer online services to EU businesses to process personal data in the US and to their EU clients. They are going to have to smarten up or pay fines, the larger the better until the message gets out there - if you do business in the EU, you obey EU law.
"Which sounds very much like a legalistic way of saying because everybody's ignoring the law, the law is irrelevant."
And the only thing that will earn them is another kicking in court.
I think the best advice that could be given to any US company that wants to do EU business that goes near personal data is to structure your operations in such a way as to ensure you're not the test case by keeping that data in the EU with proper legal firewalls between it and any part of you that the your government can seize onto.
What Max Schrems has shown us is that it doesn't matter what weasel words are agreed at political level the court will look at the reality.
"The average consumer doesn't understand how his car works either. Yet today he is able to buy a reasonable safe one."
To a large extent that's because of regulation. A big step forward would be a requirement for security testing for devices to get UL, CE etc. certification. Having devices calling home is another problem and it's unlikely that "home" will get tested. If, however, all models of popular freezer were to defrost or lights fail to turn on because a server had gone down or the maker had gone bust the public might come to realise that this too is something to avoid.
"they make sure everyone has access to a postal service"
Making sure everyone has access to a postal service amounts to having enough people on the books to ensure there's someone able to drive/walk round there. It requires some capital to provide the buildings and vehicles. Ensuring everyone has a high speed internet connection involves a huge capital expenditure.
"Virgin claimed to pass 12.6M homes a year ago"
Those homes are those that were cheapest to pass. The cable franchises go back to the '90s when BT weren't even to get involved. Now BT are being berated for not being able to instantly and cheaply cable up those that VM & their predecessors didn't get round to in all that time..
"Utilities should be publicly owned"
They were. Government was perennially reluctant to put in the required investment so they were years or decades behind where they should have been. Eventually they were privatised so the government could get its (under)investment back and the utilities could borrow at commercial rates although some (hello Railtrack) never quite got weaned.
Next we have to remember cable. HMG let various telecoms companies have cable franchises. This, as a matter of policy, excluded BT because the competitors had to have a chance/had vacant directorships (delete as appropriate). Now, years and years later, BT is expected to step in and cable up all the parts of the country that the original franchises found too difficult/expensive (delete as appropriate and did somebody mention cherry picking?) in short order. And people are amazed that the task that the original franchises borked takes a lot of time and money.
I'm surprised the OBR didn't send them away and tell them to come back with one by next week. That would have puzzled them as obviously they don't have a concept of such a brief period of time. The OBR needs teeth. It needs to be able to put a department on 3 months warning that such projects will have their budget withheld and released a month at a time subject to satisfactory progress reports until such time as they're satisfied that proper project management is in place.
I wish journos looking for a comment would start off along the lines of "We'll take it as read that you'll say customers' security is important to you. Given $cockup can you prove that?" and then follow up the next anodyne waffle with "That's a no, then.". And report that as "$wankers were unable to give us any meaningful reassurances.".
In the meantime it's long overdue that banking licences were dependant on maintaining security to top standards. The regulators should run tests for against each new vulnerability disclosure that might affect the web site. Any bank found with its site not up to date with its patches would be given no more than 3 days* to fix it or the web site would have to be taken off line until remedied. This would mean that maintaining security would become an essential part of doing business, as it should be, instead of an expensive option, which it all too often seems to be.
And while the regulators are about it, financial institutions should not be allowed to let 3rd party marketing companies to send out emails purporting to be from the institution but actually from some other domain, with out of domain links, reply-to etc, again to be policed by the regulator on pain of fines that would wipe out the marketing department's salary budget for a couple of years.
*Possibly over generous, especially if a patch has been made available prior to disclosure.
"who was extremely embarrassed by the sheer incompetence of her staff"
She should have been embarrassed by the lack of an effective escalation procedure in her operation. At the very minimum, even if the front line staff aren't capable of realising they're out of their depth, a problem that keeps coming back should be automatically escalated so that (a) the immediate problem gets fixed, (b) the front line staff are trained to handle it in future and (c) if there's a systemic problem that gets fixed. You were luck, there was someone higher to deal with it. I suspect that in most cases there isn't anyone behind the front line and that's why they can't escalate.
"There will be funnies everywhere from the Police, to teachers (about parents I expect),"
a long time ago I was a member of the Institute of Biology which was supposed to be the biologists professional body but turned out to be largely populated by teachers, or at least it was largely biology teachers who contributed to the journal. Their funnies were mostly about exam answers.
"For bonus points, download their javascript, analyse it, and tell them what buggy crap it is, pointing out where they should be using try/catch."
I've started a similar thing with spam offers to improve my website. I correct the English in their email and ask them why I'd trust somebody who writes such crap to work on my (non-existent) website.
"Tax laws should be written on one piece of paper with no get out clauses. Make it so IP can't be charged between the same company or limit it to a small % of revenue."
As soon as you start adding a few "make it so that..." clauses you end up needing a bigger piece of paper.
In international terms tax laws are in a competitive environment. Various governments have found the consequences of this on excise duties - the margin over French duties hit a level at which the booze cruise was invented. The end result is that it becomes a race to the bottom.
"So the Linux zealots on here reckon that the best Linux LotD solution is something that's pretty much as close as they can possibly get to a cosmetic and ease-of-use rip-off of Windows..?"
Let's look at that one on two levels.
Firstly, the actual suggestion was that in order to ease the transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar use a familiar interface. Applying an unfamiliar interface upsets users. Microsoft have discovered that - it would have been better for their users if they'd worked it out from first principles.
Secondly, if you go back & look what was about at the time Windows 95 came out you'd realise that it didn't spring ready-made from the forehead of Bill Gates. There were a lot of GUIs about back then. There was a good deal of cross-fertilisation.
The main application menu system until ribbons came along was based on CUA (Common User Access), mostly, IIRC, from IBM, a set of design principles intended to make things easier for users by providing consistency between applications.
A screen bottom bar with pop-up menus was already in use in interfaces such as CDE.
Some of the interface aspects came from HP's New Wave, an overlay on Win 3.
Yes, W95 put all these together very well and hit a sweet spot (apart from the error of putting the close button next to the maximise where it was too easy to hit it by mistake) but on the whole it was a synthesis of stuff a lot of other people had developed. So it's not surprising that for the desktop a lot of other designers have followed similar approaches, improving on it here & there with the like of multiple workspaces. But don't think you're looking at slavish imitation of a single original idea because you're not; you're looking at a convergence on what works best.
"Many over-60s went through the hell of fighting with DOS config files and Windows 3/3.1."
Come to that, just who were those who were the first to take up those 8-bit jobbies and put them to real use back in the '70s and how old are we now? Big clue - it wasn't our kids with the Beebs and Spectra; they came along later.
Yesterday I was the local University where someone was about to demonstrate QGIS. He had a W10 laptop. Switched on to wake it up & it started the spinning thing. So he rebooted & again went into the spinning bit, eventually rebooted & started properly. Presumably it had latched onto the local wireless network and found some updates. What's the point of trying to do something like run a demo on a platform like that. As it happens I run QGIS on this Debian laptop which, if I wanted to do so, would be able to run updates in the background without interfering with the foreground, would certainly not tie it up unasked at startup time and wouldn't force a reboot as part of the process.
'It's perfectly safe and valid to say "Hell" when naming the "place".'
Heck is in Yorkshire http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=459500&y=421500&z=120&sv=great+heck&st=3&tl=Map+of+Great+Heck,+North+Yorkshire+[City/Town/Village]&searchp=ids.srf&mapp=map.srf as is Hades http://www.streetmap.co.uk/map.srf?x=413762&y=404930&z=115&sv=413762,404930&st=4&ar=y&mapp=map.srf&searchp=ids.srf&dn=841&ax=413762&ay=404930&lm=0
